Sorting the boat out.

This entry marks the beginning of the daily logs from the 2008 expedition of Clavadel, a boat dedicated to the research of the genetic structure of common and bottlenose dolphins along the Portuguese coast. This was created to allow people involved in the project to follow the daily routine of people working out there in the sea. Given that many of them are not Portuguese native speakers, the blog will be written mainly in english.

Thislast few days have been pretty much spent sorting the boat out after a winter of maintenance work and obviously, the mess left after last year work. Just to get an idea, this is how the saloon and the bow cabin looked like the first day I got into the boat.

After a few days, however, this was looking much better,and although not perfect it is at least minimally organized and livable.

The first two volunteers have arrived today, right on time for the good weather. Up until now, weather was terrible for sampling, but now these days are gone and we should have a very good week. Tomorrow we'll try to look out for bottlenose dolphins. Given that I have seen them on Saturday in front of Alvor bay, that we still need to do some things (namely, filling the fuel tank), and most important, I don't have enough bottlenose samples, we are definitely betting on the bottlenose.

The crew is settled and feeling strong, the boat is ready and I'm eager to go out to sea. So tomorrow, fieldwork for 2008 begins.